Tag Archives: wine bloggers

Winebits 448: Bloggers, wine retailers, bootleg liquor

bloggersThis week’s wine news: The feds go after unscrupulous bloggers, wine retailer speak, and bootleg liquor.

• Transparency is all: The Federal Trade Commission has decided that “consumers have the right to know when they’re looking at paid advertising” when they’re on-line; hence, crackdowns on marketers who don’t tell us when they’re paying for content. Two cases in the past year, in which the Lord & Taylor department store and film studio Warner Bros. settled with the commission over unscrupulous practices, apparently mean the feds are serious. The Warner case was particularly egregious, reports clickz.com: “Warner Bros. gave the influencers advance copies of [a] game and paid them anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars each to promote the game to their followers with specific instructions, including ‘not to disclose any bugs or glitches they found.’ ” At least we’re not that bad in the wine business. I think.

• Retailer-speak: One of the difficulties with buying wine is that many of the the people who sell it have a completely different view of wine than consumers do. We worry about price and quality, and they care about almost everything but that. This interview, with an official at Florida’s ABC Fine Wine & Spirits, is a good example. It’s almost technical in its complexity, and the average consumer probably won’t be able to make much sense of it. But that’s how retailers think, and it’s not about what we want to buy.

• Deadly booze: Almost three dozen people have died in India over the past couple of weeks from drinking toxic liquor they bought from a local retailer. The retailer, who was arrested, was selling the booze at one-sixth the price of a name brand; some two billion liters of bootleg alcohol are sold in India every year, compared to less than three billion liters of legal liquor. In addition, 11 officials, including seven policemen, were suspended for for allowing the booze to be sold.

Winebits 224: Craft beer, wine bloggers, wine snakes

? Listen up, wine business: Jules Van Cruysen's article in Palate Press, "What the wine idustry can learn from craft beer," is nothing short of brilliant. He points out why craft beer does so well with the same people that the wine business has so much trouble reaching, and "The answer is simple ? they have mobilized their consumers around a set of shared principles to advocate on their behalf ? not only to drink craft beer, but to demand it at restaurants, bars and liquor stores and to force it into the hands of family and friends." You mean that works better than elitist and unintelligible wine reviews and point scores? Hard to believe, isn't it?

? Most influential wine bloggers: And the Wine Curmudgeon didn't make the list (which isn't suprising, is it, Groucho?) The nine names includes some surprises, no women, and someone who doesn't blog any more. It comes from the respected Paul Mabry at the Vintank consultancy in Napa, who I'm not quite sure expected the reaction to the post (if one feels like wading through the comments). One of the nine was our pal Lenn Thompson at New York Cork Report, who does yeoman work with regional wine. 

? Remember the wine fridge snakes? They were rescued from a construction project in suburban Chicago in February, when their habitat was destroyed, and placed in a wine refrigerator to finish hibernating. Turns out, reports the Chicago Tribune, that all is well. The 82 snakes were released last week into a new, specially designed snake den in a state park. No word yet on what the wine fridge will be used for next.